$2,999 Mac Pro to go on sale in December in all its Dalek-resembling glory

Made in the USA: Mac Pro overhaul finally ready for an eager legion of buyers.

The long gap between releases of Apple's most powerful computer—the Mac Pro—is finally about to come to an end. The company today announced that the first major upgrade of the Pro since August 2010 will be released in December.

The entry-level model will cost $2,999 and will come with a 3.7GHz quad-core Intel Xeon processor, 12GB of DRAM, dual AMD FirePro D300 graphics chips with 2GB VRAM each, and 256GB of SSD. The machine is being assembled in the US, Apple said today.

Mac users with heavy processing needs, such as graphics professionals, were disappointed when Apple didn't refresh the stagnating platform last year. CEO Tim Cook promised that great news for Mac Pro users would come sometime in 2013, and Apple delivered on that promise in June when it unveiled a Mac Pro with a smaller design and upgraded internals. At the time, Apple said only that it would be "coming later this year," and the company didn't announce the official launch window until today.

The Mac Pro now has a cylindrical design, looking much like a black trash can. Its shell can be taken off in a "Darth Vader's helmet" sort of way, revealing futuristic looking innards that I like to think resemble a Dalek.

The Mac Pro.

Apple

Daleks.

BBC

As we noted in previous coverage, fully loaded Pros can feature up to 12 cores-worth of Intel Xeon E5 chips, with up to 30MB L3 cache and 40GBps PCI Express bandwidth. There's a four-channel DDR3 memory controller that runs at 1866MHz, delivering up to 60GBps of memory bandwidth (twice as high as the previous model). Two AMD FirePro GPUs with up to 6GB of dedicated VRAM each help support up to three 4K displays, with GPU performance going from 2.7 to seven teraflops. Apple also promised 528GB/s total bandwidth.

"There's never been a system that can do what the Mac Pro can do with 4K video," Apple Senior VP of Marketing Phil Schiller said today.

The Mac Pro can have up to 1TB of user-accessible flash storage, with 1.2GB/s read speeds and 1GB/s write speed. Wireless connectivity is provided with 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0.

With its cover off, ports for Thunderbolt 2, USB 3, Gigabit Ethernet, and HDMI 1.4 are revealed. Thunderbolt in particular is impressive, with six ports, each supporting up to six daisy-chained devices, 36 in total. Thunderbolt will provide 20Gbps throughput, Apple said today.

The new Mac Pro design also helps with power and cooling. Instead of multiple heat sinks and fans, heat is conducted away from the CPUs and GPUs and distributed across a "unified thermal core." That means "if one processor isn’t working as hard as the others, the extra thermal capacity can be shared efficiently among them," Apple has said.

The Mac Pro is environmentally friendly, with Energy Star 6 and EPEAT Gold certifications, Apple said. In an idle state, it consumes 43 watts and will be about as loud as a Mac mini.

Although the specs and re-design are impressive, the small package isn't completely beneficial to potential users. Dave Girard noted in his "Critical look at the new Mac Pro" that the machine has "a truly epic lack of expandability." Apple called it "the most expandable Mac ever built" because of its Thunderbolt ports, but Girard noted that it has no extra internal drive bays, only four USB 3.0 ports, and no optical drive. There's also no Nvidia option for the GPU.

The Mac Pro may not have everything users want, and it likely won't be the best-selling Mac computer. But with the three-year gap in major updates making Windows-based workstations look attractive even to Mac devotees, the Pro's release is important for Apple to hold on to users with the most intensive computing needs.

Apple’s event is currently in progress, and we will update this article as more details become available. Ars is there in person, so for up-to-the-minute information you can follow our liveblog.

Promoted Comments

I'm in no way a "media creation pro". I do a lot of bootstrapping statistics and phylogenetic trees (which is moderately computationally intensive) in my day job. BUT, I am also a pretty high end hobbyist photographer... And to put the $3K cost of the entry level machine in context; this year alone I spent ~$10,000 on a 3 week trip to Chile, dragging with me ~20K worth of photographic equipment to pursue this hobby.

I am a heavy Aperture user, occasional Photoshop and Final Cut Pro.

The entry level machine kicks my current MacPro's butt, and costs less than the D800e I shoot with every couple of weeks, yet I am in front of my MacPro every single day. I'm probably going to buy one...

I suspect that the target/potential audience is broader and deeper than many suspect.

Spec wise this is pretty close in price to existing workstations from Dell and HP in that price range and feature set. The Mac has Thunderbolt2 while they have internal expandability. Depending on your usage one may be better than the other. Generally I would go with internal known parts over pie in the sky maybe someone will make them parts.

The big differentiator for pro hardware is warranty support. What kind of support does the Mac Pro have? HP Z230's have three year next business day parts and labor and 24/7 phone support standard. With options to buy upgrades as well. Last I knew Apple had nothing like this.

238 Reader Comments

An entry level machine with a $3k price tag seems like an oxymoron. Given the limitations, it will be interesting to see who hangs on and who jumps. I suspect that those that stay will be as much for the software as anything else.

$3k isn't a bad entry level machine if you're actually using it as a workstation for what it's target market is: Multimedia creation professionals.

For home users, you're correct, this is not a machine aimed for them.

But then given that it ships with a 256GB SSD, it's apparently not for multimedia creation professionals either....

Do you think that folks who work on multiple large projects in a professional setting keep them on their primary OS hard disk?

as someone who works in IT, sadly yes. most people don't learn they shouldn't be doing that until its too late.

Just for grins: Apple currently has pictures of the brand new Mac Pro on their refurbished site (http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/s ... ac/mac_pro). You can even add it to your cart, but if you chat with them they refuse to honor the price. I have to admit that the description is of a 2012 machine, but it's still a shame!

#1 problem with the replies in this thread are that people are comparing to Dell.

Last year I tried making a workhorse PC at Dell. They wanted $6000 and I believe it only had a single Hex-Core Xeon.

I was able to configure one with Dual Hex-Core Xeon 64GB of RAM and it only cost $2000 from a custom built shop. (If only I could build it.) Albeit, it doesn't have a GPU at the moment, one could easily tack on a Titan and bring it up to $3000. Superior to the Dell in every way and LITERALLY half the cost.

Just because Dell is screwing you, and Apple is screwing you AS MUCH doesn't mean that you're getting a fair deal.

(For those wondering, Xilinx tools are a bear.)

Seriously, what happened to the ARS userbase that we're comparing conglomerate A to conglomerate B? Building a computer is as easy as LEGOs. And even then, some LEGOs nowadays have some pretty fancy schmancy parts. So LESS difficult than LEGOs.

Audio/Video people need this. To keep the thing from being $5000+ And less heavy than the current Mac Pros they needed to rely on thunderbolt for external storage.

Well this "mere enthusiast type" realizes that the "needs of the Pro market" probably don't include components that the "Pro market" can't even use yet for lack of any support from Apple. Chances are, this thing is a big kick in the balls to all of the legacy users out there that already have storage solutions in place.

Regular floor workers in an Apple retail store make $12-15 part time. This is a bit less than the Genius workers behind the tech benches.

If that video is any indication we are not talking regular line workers. These are some pretty sophisticated positions with a lot of foreknowledge required in mathematics and I am sure some are engineering positions. I would not be surprised to find the jobs are minimum of $45k/year and up. Plus full benefits on top of that.

Wow the price is a lot less then i expected. Is really a great machine, GPU performance from stats are from 2xNvidia quadro 6K, witch seems it will have a start price of 5k$. The awesome bandwidth for SSD and GPUs will increase performance a lot even if the CPU is only one Xeon. Great workstation at an affordable price for any pro. And STOP saying it does not have expandability because these days EVERY professional works with external storage, plus is dam 50 eu a 1TB USB 3.0 HDD, and you have great bandwidth external. Not to mention a lower electric bill cost because when you work on a workstation witch uses 1KW/h + u start taking in to account these things to, specially cooling in summer. PS, i am a ''pro'' in 3D/vfx industry for over 10 years and at work i was using high end huge workstations using windoze most, but at home i still work on my old 955 BE with 16 gb ram and 1GB FirePro card and doing sometimes many thousands of eu a day. Because if u need to render very high end 3D stuff, you will use an online renderfarm anyway and for other easy stuff you will render at night when you sleep so you don't have wasted time. Is more important a reliable system who works around the clock without a problem, is not all about raw performance. I worked many years on damm windoze workstations but at same time i edited and done vfx stuff, documentaries, movies, adds, commercials, you name it on very modest hardware, macs included and always on time delivered to clients. A real pro will never say stats counts first. Its all about reliability, that is the thing you pay for as a pro.

Audio/Video people need this. To keep the thing from being $5000+ And less heavy than the current Mac Pros they needed to rely on thunderbolt for external storage. (How A/V Pros use their computers normally.)

It's not SUPPOSED to apply to YOU or Joe Six Pack down the street.

The problem people are complaining about is that there are a lot of customers of workstation class A/V machines for whom this is not a suitable machine. It isn't that there is zero market for this -- large AV shops that have invested in 10s of kilodollars or more in SAN storage are certainly a reasonable market. But this leaves out a lot of previously loyal mac pro customers including smaller A/V shops, scientific and CAD users. And the annoying this is that it was apparently done for no good reason. Who cares if the machine is small? What advantage does that offer the professional user? A more traditional tower/desktop style case like previous Mac Pro offerings would, if anything, cost less. Or they could have kept the funky design and made it slightly larger to accommodate 2-4 internal drives.

If a machine with the same specs could support an internal 2x2 TB or 4x2 TB software RAID 1/10 it would be a credible stand-alone workstation for a lot of users who need the performance, reliability, and support of a workstation class machine, but don't have an existing SAN or NAS infrastructure and who don't want to have to use an external thunderbolt enclosure.

Looking at the tech specs on apple's site, it shows the system as having a 450W power supply. Now I'm even more curious what these D300 and D500 FirePros are. Either they're analogous to some of AMD's dual GPU offerings - perhaps optimized for lower power consumption. or they're actually based off of their mobility (laptop) line of FirePros, or they're more heavily customized parts than I would have assumed. The actual GPUs are probably straight out of one of their existing lines (either mobile or workstation), but if the D500 ends up rivaling other dual GPU high-end workstation offerings and working with a 450W power supply then I really hope whatever it is shows up in their general offerings down the line.

Yes, it is. Please stop living in such a bubble and actually go price compare at any old OEM. Just tossing together a roughly comparable system at a bunch of places, with a quad core Xeon, dual FirePros comes under $2K, and unlike the Mac Pro it doesn't require another $1k in external boxes and cables just to get basic stuff like slots or HDD bays. Even with the Apple premium it's outrageous.

Links, please. I tried to do this at HP and got prices in the same ballpark, for roughly comparable systems ($2,897.00 at HP for a HP-Z230, Xeon E-3 1230 3.3 GHZ, 16GB RAM, 256 GB SSD, and nVIDIA NVS 510; more RAM on the HP, some of the components on the Mac Pro are better, but whatever...). At Lenovo, the result was $3100+. Again, you can't make an exactly comparable system.

Its in the ballpark, for sure.

There are tradeoffs with any design, and its clear you don't like the ones that Apple has made. But don't assume that your priorities are everyone else's. It looks to suit our purposes very well (higher-ed, scientific visualization lab)...

And don't fall back on the "you guys are just in it for the pretty design" argument. It's weak, and doesn't speak well of your reasonableness.

It's a pretty safe take-away to assume that Apple is now firmly putting the Mac Pro out of the pro-am and lightweight-production realm into the Pro Workstation realm. There's gonna be a lot of griping from folks who were used to buying the lowest end Pro as an alternative to the higher-end iMac.

Yep, that's probably my case. I was happy to buy the early 2008 model, with 500€ shaved off thanks to the single CPU option. Maybe I could have done with a high-end iMac, but then I'd have had to replace it at some point, whereas my 2008 Mac Pro, almost 6 years later, is still running without any sign of weakness.

I would have liked to replace it with the new "Dalek" model, but 3000€ + external peripherals is probably too rich for my blood. Nonetheless, it's not a bad starting price, there's simply no room for an option that I could remove to drop the price.

All that power and still no 2nd-gen Thunderbolt Cinema Display. I feel like a broken record at this point: THE DISPLAY, APPLE, GIVE IT TO US! It's literally already manufactured a la iMac, just change a few parts and sell the damn thing... it's been over 750 days!

Yep, great for video pros, crap for anyone else.For software development, I don't need two "pro" cards with questionable performance, just one non pro would be fine.I do need 16 Gb RAM or more, and I don't think I can live with just 256 Gb of internal storage. Those VMs will eat all your space in a jiffy if you're not looking.

Can anybody find a thing about the "FirePro D300"? AMD's site has nothing to say on the matter, and Google finds only references to how the new Mac Pro will have two of them. Is it a total joke, as is traditional for the default option in Mac Pros, or did they up their game on this one?

It's very similar to the FirePro V7900. Both have 1280 SPs, 2GB GDDR5, and 160GB/s memory bandwidth. The D300 might be binned for lower power or have reduced clock speeds.

Ehhhh, this is a workstation and of course it has that kind of price tag. The HP Z820 with one Firepro W7000 is 3550, and the closest Dell Precision T3600 build comes in at around $3300.

But both of those will allow for future graphics, main drive, and PCI-E upgrades without external thunderbolt cases. One of the big complaints on the initial announcement was from many users of older Mac Pros who need RAID cards for an external array, or for various specialized tasks that now need to transit over the slower Thunderbolt connection (20Gb/s Thunderbolt 2 vs 64Gb/s on an x16 2.0 interface) and pay an extra grand for an enclosure that further bottlenecks the three cards to a single interface.

It's a tradeoff of "fancy new Mac hardware" for the loss of the flexibility of the old model and what windows/linux workstations can do.

They have already announced this product like 3-4months ago. Why is this a surprise? It's not like Apple drop a bombshell on you. Let's see how the community reacts. The market will sort itself out. What's the problem with that?

If they succeed, that means that you have no idea what you are talking about, and you should give them the benefit of the doubt next time around.If they failed, then you have made your case and every doubter will have a field day.

Their track record so far has been good, so I will give them the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise.

I have no personal interest in the Mac Pro directly, but I was really interested in Apple's design decision to restrict expansion to external devices. It actually makes a lot of sense, now that the multiple cable-transfer protocols have caught up to internal connectors. The only remaining issue would be how to prevent the presence of having 3+ power adapters underneath your desk.

Now I'm sort of imagining this on the low-end too; it should be possible for things like GPUs and disc drives to all be external. On the one hand, it might make for a mess kept in a drawer or something. On the other, it could allow for upgradable components without forcing all consumers to pull apart their computer.

Does anyone actually know what and AMD FirePro D300 is? I can only find references to it as relates to this new Mac Pro. Exactly where this fits in the midrange to highend spectrum makes a huge difference.

For Apple, sales of this class of machine amount to a hobby. They’re selling iPads in tens of millions.

I wish their hobby extended to real entry level machines: a step up from the Mac mini, with better expansion options.

And it’s about time someone else spotted the obvious dalek inspiration in the design – even the dark backdrops in all the PR materials fit the theme.

I have no personal interest in the Mac Pro directly, but I was really interested in Apple's design decision to restrict expansion to external devices. It actually makes a lot of sense, now that the multiple cable-transfer protocols have caught up to internal connectors. The only remaining issue would be how to prevent the presence of having 3+ power adapters underneath your desk.

Now I'm sort of imagining this on the low-end too; it should be possible for things like GPUs and disc drives to all be external. On the one hand, it might make for a mess kept in a drawer or something. On the other, it could allow for upgradable components without forcing all consumers to pull apart their computer.

Thunderbolt 2 is still 24Gb/s slower than a PCI-E 2.0 x16 slot, and an external case with 3 slots has to bottleneck those cards over one line, so no, that's an expensive downgrade for the type of user with specialized cards.

Can anybody find a thing about the "FirePro D300"? AMD's site has nothing to say on the matter, and Google finds only references to how the new Mac Pro will have two of them. Is it a total joke, as is traditional for the default option in Mac Pros, or did they up their game on this one?

It's very similar to the FirePro V7900. Both have 1280 SPs, 2GB GDDR5, and 160GB/s memory bandwidth. The D300 might be binned for lower power or have reduced clock speeds.

For reference, a V7900 is over $600 on Newegg.

Keep in mind the system has a 450W power supply and those cards draw up to 150W each. The performance of those retail cards may not be entirely predictive of the performance of the parts in the new Mac Pro even if it were clear which base parts were going into it, depending on how they are keeping power consumption down.

An entry level machine with a $3k price tag seems like an oxymoron. Given the limitations, it will be interesting to see who hangs on and who jumps. I suspect that those that stay will be as much for the software as anything else.

The author got it wrong. Instead of entry level, the correct term is "base price".

The Mac Pro is not entry level, it is a pro device. If you want entry level, then the iMac and the Mac mini are for you.

It's very similar to the FirePro V7900. Both have 1280 SPs, 2GB GDDR5, and 160GB/s memory bandwidth. The D300 might be binned for lower power or have reduced clock speeds.

For reference, a V7900 is over $600 on Newegg.

The V7900 is an obsolete product based on the Cayman architecture found on the Radeon 6970/6950 class of video cards.

Whoops, W7000 then. Strange that Apple would reduce the VRAM to 2GB though.

Maybe it's more like a dual GPU variant of the W7000 then - they didn't reduce the VRAM to 2GB they split the 4GB between two GPUs. Basically picture a dual GPU single-card spread across two circuit boards - you're saving money and some power by not duplicating components you don't have to. They could still be directly connected like they would be on a single card dual-GPU offering, across something that might be mistaken for a beefier crossfire bridge. Why spread it out across two pieces of plastic instead of cramming it all in one like they do with dual GPU radeons? Probably to fit inside the machine, and also since the machine has only one fan you'd pretty much ave to expose as much surface area as you could to keep it cool.

It's very similar to the FirePro V7900. Both have 1280 SPs, 2GB GDDR5, and 160GB/s memory bandwidth. The D300 might be binned for lower power or have reduced clock speeds.

For reference, a V7900 is over $600 on Newegg.

The V7900 is an obsolete product based on the Cayman architecture found on the Radeon 6970/6950 class of video cards.

Whoops, W7000 then. Strange that Apple would reduce the VRAM to 2GB though.

Maybe it's more like a dual GPU variant of the W7000 then - they didn't reduce the VRAM to 2GB they split the 4GB between two GPUs. Basically picture a dual GPU single-card spread across two circuit boards - you're saving money and some power by not duplicating components you don't have to. They could still be directly connected like they would be on a single card dual-GPU offering, across something that might be mistaken for a beefier crossfire bridge. Why spread it out across two pieces of plastic instead of cramming it all in one like they do with dual GPU radeons? Probably to fit inside the machine, and also since the machine has only one fan you'd pretty much ave to expose as much surface area as you could to keep it cool.

If you read down a bit and change tabs on the store page, you can see that:Processors are 4,6, and 12 core.Video cards are 2-6Gb each (it also changes the model number when it goes up)And ram is split differently too for some reason. (the channeldnes I am sure)

#1 problem with the replies in this thread are that people are comparing to Dell.

Last year I tried making a workhorse PC at Dell. They wanted $6000 and I believe it only had a single Hex-Core Xeon.

I was able to configure one with Dual Hex-Core Xeon 64GB of RAM and it only cost $2000 from a custom built shop. (If only I could build it.) Albeit, it doesn't have a GPU at the moment, one could easily tack on a Titan and bring it up to $3000. Superior to the Dell in every way and LITERALLY half the cost.

Just because Dell is screwing you, and Apple is screwing you AS MUCH doesn't mean that you're getting a fair deal.

(For those wondering, Xilinx tools are a bear.)

Seriously, what happened to the ARS userbase that we're comparing conglomerate A to conglomerate B? Building a computer is as easy as LEGOs. And even then, some LEGOs nowadays have some pretty fancy schmancy parts. So LESS difficult than LEGOs.

Part of buying a workstation is support actually. It's not entirely parts vs parts.

#1 problem with the replies in this thread are that people are comparing to Dell.

Last year I tried making a workhorse PC at Dell. They wanted $6000 and I believe it only had a single Hex-Core Xeon.

I was able to configure one with Dual Hex-Core Xeon 64GB of RAM and it only cost $2000 from a custom built shop. (If only I could build it.) Albeit, it doesn't have a GPU at the moment, one could easily tack on a Titan and bring it up to $3000. Superior to the Dell in every way and LITERALLY half the cost.

Just because Dell is screwing you, and Apple is screwing you AS MUCH doesn't mean that you're getting a fair deal.

Without knowing what the actual specs of the machine are, it is hard to tell why the price of the Dell was so high. After being in the Aerospace industry for about seven years, I've seen a lot of different CAD workstation prices.

Xeons come in wildly different prices. The OE price for the Dell I mentioned earlier is $1440 (though Dell didn't pay this price, and neither did I most likely). For comparison, the OE cost for the processor specced in the new Mac Pro is $294. SSD prices vary wildly too, especially for the upper store tiers.

It's very similar to the FirePro V7900. Both have 1280 SPs, 2GB GDDR5, and 160GB/s memory bandwidth. The D300 might be binned for lower power or have reduced clock speeds.

For reference, a V7900 is over $600 on Newegg.

The V7900 is an obsolete product based on the Cayman architecture found on the Radeon 6970/6950 class of video cards.

Whoops, W7000 then. Strange that Apple would reduce the VRAM to 2GB though.

Maybe it's more like a dual GPU variant of the W7000 then - they didn't reduce the VRAM to 2GB they split the 4GB between two GPUs. Basically picture a dual GPU single-card spread across two circuit boards - you're saving money and some power by not duplicating components you don't have to. They could still be directly connected like they would be on a single card dual-GPU offering, across something that might be mistaken for a beefier crossfire bridge. Why spread it out across two pieces of plastic instead of cramming it all in one like they do with dual GPU radeons? Probably to fit inside the machine, and also since the machine has only one fan you'd pretty much ave to expose as much surface area as you could to keep it cool.

If you read down a bit and change tabs on the store page, you can see that:Processors are 4,6, and 12 core.Video cards are 2-6Gb each (it also changes the model number when it goes up)And ram is split differently too for some reason. (the channeldnes I am sure)

Yes I've seen that, it's where I got the 450W system power spec from. If you read down you'll see that is a common specification for all configurations. . I was speculating specifically about what the D300 might be, but yes you are correct if you were suggesting that D500s or D700s are going to face the same power limitations. Thinking of it as a dual GPU variation of the W7000 spread across two pieces of plastics was a way to explain how it might save on power and parts costs.

If you look at this picture of the GPU setup for the Mac Pro, you can see that it is not using two identical cards:

So yeah I think they're sharing some components to save on part costs and on power consumption. That visual, the lack of an nvidia option and the matter of fact way in which it has been described as non-upgradable makes me think that the system includes proprietary expanded bridge between two cards as part of the main system board - which might contain shared components which two off the shelf video cards would each normally contain. That's not necessarily a bad thing, as that can mean better bang for your buck than two full priced cards would particularly in the upper-midrange of options.

Also probably should point out that even if this is like a dual-gpu single card setup, in terms of the cards sharing some critical components, it would have a leg up compared to past examples of those in that a single PCIE interface is not one of those components.

I have no personal interest in the Mac Pro directly, but I was really interested in Apple's design decision to restrict expansion to external devices. It actually makes a lot of sense, now that the multiple cable-transfer protocols have caught up to internal connectors. The only remaining issue would be how to prevent the presence of having 3+ power adapters underneath your desk.

Now I'm sort of imagining this on the low-end too; it should be possible for things like GPUs and disc drives to all be external. On the one hand, it might make for a mess kept in a drawer or something. On the other, it could allow for upgradable components without forcing all consumers to pull apart their computer.

Thunderbolt has a sleeper spec that commenters like you tend to ignore: it has a 50 meter range! That is half a football field (american football). You don't have to have external storage on or under your desk; you can locate them in your data center.